1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention relates in general, to an electronically controlled cooking apparatus and specifically to electronically controlled feedback cooking devices which use the feedback of actually sensed data during the cooking process to automatically and efficiently control the application of heat to the cooking food.
2. Description of the Prior Art:
Prior inventions provided for electronically controlled timing, primarily involving the activation of the magnitron of a microwave oven, as disclosed in, for example, Tachihara, U.S. Pat. No. 4,367,387 issued Jan. 4, 1983, which used microprocessors as a central controlling means with information such as cooking duration, cooking temperature and the amount of heat output desired entered manually by the operator. U.S. Pat. No. 4,309,584 to Terakami shows a keyboard control for a microwave oven which is intended to establish oven temperatures over selected periods of time, all without direct temperature feedback from the foodstuff. None of the prior devices provide for, and it is desirable to provide for, automatic adjustment of the amount of heat applied by the heat source based on direct sensing of the food temperature throughout the cooking process. The actual food temperature as sensed is then employed as feedback to the microprocessor control unit to correspondingly vary the amount of heat applied to the vessel.
Further, it is desirable to permit the remote control of the programmable multi-function feedback cooking across the room, or even from across town.
Moreover, none of the previous inventions provided for controlling the area over which heat is supplied to the bottom surface of the cooking vessel. These prior art devices thus suffer the shortcoming that heat from a heating element such as a flame or electrical heating element when emanating from an area greater than the area of the bottom of the cooking vessel is, in part, lost.
Prior inventions were very limited in controlling the amount of heat supplied by a heat source which was typically selected by the operator choosing "high", "medium" or "low". If the operator wished to raise the internal temperature of the cooking vessel or oven heat source as quickly as possible, and then reduce the heat and thereafter maintain the desired cooking temperature, operator was required to approximate when the heat should be reduced in effort to obtain the most efficient use of the heat generated.
Accordingly, the present invention performs such temperature adjustments automatically. The invention provides for the actual sensing of the food temperature and uses the information in a feedback circuit to automatically adjust the amount of heat being applied to the cooking food.